Andrea
Martignoni
Performer,
sound designer, historian in Animation.
He has
created soundtracks for short animated films by Blu, Saul Saguatti, Michele
Bernardi, Pierre Hébert and others. He teaches history of animation in Fine
Arts Palermo, and works closely with several international festivals with
master classes, workshops, lectures on topics related to animation and
soundtrack. He is often invited to international juries and selection
committees throughout the world.
He has
performed with Basmati, Pierre Hébert, Theodore Ushev, Compagnia d’Arte
Drummatica in several international film and music festivals in Europe. Carries
workshops together with Basmati B.C. and Ottomani Cultural Association and his
active in promoting the Italian animated
film internationally. He won the Golden
Reiter for the best soundtrack to the 23 th edition of the International Short
Film Festival FilmFest Dresden and the Asifa Award Italy in 2010. He curated
with Paola Bristot, ANIMAZIONI, a DVD collection about Italian contemporary
animation.
ANIMAZIONI
2
Working on
an Italian short film collection for a second time is even more exciting than
the first. Mainly because a second edition
implies that you have staked your time and energies on this project.
After a year and a half, it seems that the new Italian animated production has
not come to a standstill, so that our task is not yet accomplished. If
anything, we have just started our investigation.
Gianni
Canova recently talked of a 'Nouvelle Vague' in Italian animation. Even without
referring to this brilliant film
movement, there are certainly many attention-grabbing situations
taking place in different places at the same time. In fact, it was
relatively easy to come across new
artists, like Nicola Console, with his debut Dieci Cadute, after several
theatre collaborations, or experienced
Alvise Renzini, and his Ci sono gli Spiriti, experimental in
technique and taste.
A further
evidence of vitality is the ability, displayed by the artists included in the
first collection, of constantly renewing their style and contents. Donato
Sansone presents another tiny gem, Topo Glassato al Cioccolato, pictures
animated in rhythm once again perfectly integrated with Enrico Ascoli excellent
sound work; ' hardy' Saul Saguatti and
Audrey Coianiz, the 'evergreen' Michele Bernardi, and Igor Imhoff , who's
established himself as one of our finest artists, with his new Percorso#
0009-0410.
We are
proud to host, as previously with
Gianluigi Toccafondo's Piccola Russia, a masterwork of Italian animation
in the last ten years: Roberto Catani's La Funambola. This film provides a
vital link with the Urbino's ISA art scene. It's no accident that many artists
are based in this area: the fascinating, and at the same time disturbing, debut
of young Marco Cappellacci, Le Fobie del Guardrail, and the passionate work of
Alessia Travaglini Silenziosa-mente.
Different
technique, although similar passion, in Beatrice Pucci's Imago, a complex
puppet animation with a strong impact, clearly connected to the aesthetic and
techniques of the East European School,
as well as The journey of the Birdboy creation by Chiara Ambrosio, a London-based
multi-faceted artist who has collaborated with many musicians of contemporary
British scene. A touch of inspired insanity
is guaranteed with Aztrokitifk & Mario si danno al Crimine! by Ivan
Manuppelli and Gianluca Lo Presti.
Italian
animation seems to have finally found a fertile ground : a clear demonstration
is the film originated in Turin's CSC, Dalila Rovazzani and Giovanni Munari's
Arithmetique , a bold short film based on Maurice Ravel's musical score of the
opera L’Enfant et le sortilège. Donato
Sansone ,too,graduated at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, as well as
the authors of Giallo a Milano, coproduced by the CSC.
In addition
to this selection, the number of
children and young people involved in the making of animated short films and successfully attending
International festivals is constantly increasing. This is why we think that our Raccolte may still be
relevant in the future.
Program
Chiara Ambrosio - The Journey of the Birdboy - Italy, 2007 - 4: 23
The animation work of
Chiara Ambrosio is an exploration into ideas of memory, loss and illusion
through the use of animation, photography and video installation, deeply rooted
in the surreal, absurdist world of Czech and Eastern European animation and
literature. Chiara works with both live action and animation (using puppets and
found objects), together with light and sound, to create short visual poems or
prayers, often relying on music and sound to engage with the emotional,
irrational and subliminal side of the mind. (http://www.acuriousroom.com)
Sergio Basso, Lorenzo Latrofa - Giallo a Milano - Italy, 2009 - 6:51
Giallo a Milano, a 3 episode animation, is part of a movie of the same name on Milanese
Chinatown. The storyboard was based on pictures collected by Stefano Basso, a
specialist in Chinese art, and Daniele
Cologna’s photographs, a sinologist close to the Chinese community in Milan.
Longxing, the film main character, cooperates with the police and describes his
journey from China to Italy, via Russia. Animation conveys poetic and suggestive
significance to a tragic series of events, with unique stylistic devices
awarded at Annecy in 2010.
Michele Bernardi - Djuma - Italy, 2012 - 3:50
Djuma is a work of some power in its study of the more violent aspects
of the Human psyche. With an almost sumptuous ease and design flair,
something of which is captured in the screenshot, the rampage through the
countryside and cities has a resonance when one considers the riots that
periodically besmirch all our countries. Shades of William Golding with maybe
just a touch of Joseph Conrad - sorry for the English references here - in the
judgement on mankind, for Djuma is a metaphor for human nature, I think, and
its assessment is grim. Particularly if one is brought up by wolves. But
there's such artistry and glamour in the depiction. (Ian Lumsden, http://www.animationblog.org,)
Marco Capellacci - Le Fobie del
Guardrail - Italy 2012 - 5:00
The story deals with the mimesis without filters of one child's mental escapes. The characters, cryptic and absorbed,
lean out over the guardrail, metaphoric representation of the interior universe
of the child. The images reveal his secret, his hidden kingdom of darkness made
of screams and sounds.
Nicola Console - Dieci cadute - Italy, 2012 - 17:57
Loosely based on La caduta, by Martino Lo Cascio, this animated
film develops from a chalk drawing on black plastic sheets, with photographs
interacting with camera shooting. A remarkable combination to approach current affairs topics, and play power politics with famous dictators
and their sad followers. Nicola Console
rearranges his accusation from a rhetorical
and contingent level to universal poetic language.
Igor Imhoff - Percorso#0009-0410 - Italy, 2010 - 4:28
In Percorso Imhoff creates
a fairy-tale ambience, exploring
the crossing paths of concentric worlds, where a thin thread conveys the vision from micro to
macro, thus developing an evocative metaphor, in which different levels of
existence become dependent on one
another. In addition, the “pop/pulp” aesthetic of this video provides an
intriguing up-to-date atmosphere to
Imhoff’ usual timeless setting. The graphic elegance and sophisticated technical
ability take the audience to a
stratified universe where you can easily
get lost. (http://www.artevideoromafestival.org/ Bruno Di
Marino)
Ivan Manuppelli, Gianluca Lo Presti - Aztrokitifk
& Mario Show, si danno al Crimine - Italy, 2008 - 5:00
This is the first episode of an animated series, Aztrokitifk &
Mario Show, based on a comic with
the same name. The protagonists of the series are Aztrokitifk & Mario, a
caramel cat and a voodoo doll, eager to conquer the planet. In each episode a tragicomic sketch create
veritable micro-stories twisting every narrative genre. The Show is a
distorted version of burlesque, of the medicine shows of black America and
vaudeville. The stage is set inside an old, shabby, tacky and
old-fashioned theatre. Aztrokitifk & Mario are a side-effect of the
economic crisis and their Show a decadent will of redemption. www.mammafotogramma.it
Giovanni Munari, Dalila Rovazzani - Arithmétique - Italy, 2010 - 4:00
Arithmétique is Giovanni
Munari e Dalila Rovazzani’s graduation at CSC-Animation Department in Chieri.
An excellent test on a fragment from Maurice Ravel’s opera L'enfant et les
sortileges, ‘A Lyric Fantasy in Two Parts’ with a libretto by
Colette (1925). Dalila Rovazzani e Giovanni Munari used to the full potential
the musical and narrative “coup de scène’ , following the rhythm of this
eccentric opera.
Beatrice Pucci - Imago - Italy, 2008 - 5:50
Imago is a complex fascinating work whose title refers to the last
metamorphic state of butterflies and moths. It describes a ritual marking a
life change, and solicits a sacrifice in order to achieve it. The switch in the
first frame shows (indicates) the polarities the main character will have to
pass through, the cruel beauty of a robotic doll caged in her crinoline. With a
conjuring trick, the mutant creature materializes a fish, and mimics its death
throes. She moves her arms as wings and finally swallows it . Then she starts
dancing, and she becomes covered with white fluff a cocoon dress designed by
deconstructionist professionals. The
final frame gets back to the case with five Death's-head Hawk moths
flapping their wings, only the Acherontia Atropos are now six. (Luiza
Samanda Turrini, http://www.braintwisting.com,)
Alvise
Renzini - Ci sono gli spiriti - Italy, 2009 - 6:20
There are spirits is a free
visual interpretation of a Carl Gustav Jung’s dream. The dream starts off with
a quite common archetype: one's own home, the most familiar place for each of
us, as an unexplored entity. Jung finds himself entering a series of
"secret" rooms: the first room is an zoological laboratory where his father carries out several
experiments. The second is a bedroom where his mother attempts to capture
spirits. The third is a big hotel's Hall, prelude of thousands of other rooms,
where an orchestra is playing. The technique with which the piece is realized
consists in drawings on acetate carried out with either watercolours or tempera
colours, or drawings made with cotton filaments, dust, hair, stamped in
stop-motion in a darkroom on photographic paper in black and white. Some parts
are instead realized with drawings in tempera colours on cardboard paper and
candle soot.The obtained photographs were subsequently scanned and sequenced. (Alvise
Renzini, http://www.opificiociclope.com/).
Saul Saguatti, Audrey Coïaniz - Corpus No Body - Italy, 2010 - 6:00
Corpus No Body is a study on
the human machine, exploring different solutions, skills, attitudes or physical
specificity in human framework. Human body depicted in different typologies,
linked to psychic diversity and genetic complexity, ageing, malformations, each
man machine with its own characteristics, performing in motion and moving in
space, as different rhythms and skills. Human microcosm pinpoint its movement skills in space… Corpus No
Body show that it is possible to
overcome this diversity that influences the way we perceive others, altering
the normal motor abilities linked to common sense. (Basmati,
2010, http://www.basmati.it)
Donato Sansone aka Milkyeyes - Topo glassato al cioccolato - Italy, 2011 - 2:40
Topo glassato al cioccolato it's a
dreamlike, dark and surreal vision in wich the elements swirl around, running
after themselves in an endless scene. Topo glassato al cioccolato is a
project for a film, it was developed
spontaneously during the act, when I was working at it. I had a guess, but it
gets evolved by instinct. Then I had the general vision about how it had to
finish. This way of work allows my mind and my feelings to come out without
restraint, playing with different ideas and letting the unconscious out.
Usually, when I expand a project I do it around a single idea born in a
specific moment, but ideas aren’t firm, the thought evolves and it drags me to
new perspectives, without conceiving them before. The research on sounds by
Enrico Ascoli created a powerful and lysergic audio-morphing from a material to another, and designed a deep,
still and dark atmosphere. (Donato Sansone, 2012).
Alessia Travaglini - Silenziosa-Mente - Italy, 2011 - 5:00
Silenziosa-Mente
was built on the rotoscope technique. The female main character
deals with complex relationships and external communications , symbolically
represented by a row of hanging telephones, a free interpretation of the less
technologic visions of Dalì’s soft watches. Animation highlights the central
events of the story: a quarrel between dog headed and cat headed politicians, a
zombie, the mental obnubilation by a word whirl. An amazing performance by a
young artist mostly devoted to video-clips, displaying her original narrative
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